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my name is crazy buttocks on a train, and a birdie tol me (Xenon specs leaked)
- Thread starter crazy buttocks on a train
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MightyHedgehog
Member
border said:
Or maybe, the standard memory units are of a decent size that can easily facilitate downloadable content/save/CD ripping-mp3 & wma file storage and users can just buy bigger/more units to save upon. Connectivity to Media Center/desktop PCs can also supply extra storage. In this way, developer support for all of the things that XBOX can do is still ensured while giving the user options for more and different sources of storage, including remote online space.
sonycowboy
Member
MightyHedgehog said:
Only if we all have media center PC's.
*** Hugs his Powermac G5 ***
Christ, have you people just been ignoring the whole xbox 2 rumor mill for the past year? The multiple console versions with a lack of a basic hard drive has been pretty much confirmed by all sorts of characters. The hard drive is being dropped from the xbox as a gaming utility - period. Xbox 2 games will not use a hard drive. The version that does ship with a hard drive will probably use it to hook up with a windows PC to stream media and, maybe, backwards compatibility. But it will not be used for gaming. To me, this makes sense. You have an xbox 2 "pure gaming console" all the way up to an xbox 2 "multimedia desktop / set top machine". You can buy whatever you want. While I would like an HDD to be included standard on all machines, I can see how MS wants to cut this to reduce cost.
crazy buttocks on a train
quite possibly the greatest username
mmm cuple more things
-- 5.1 sound, 720p, Pal 60, 16:9 ratio - standard suport for all Xenon titles. ALL of them must have this suport. Well the pal stuff is euroland only, but we're smart enoguht to figure that out heh
-- 5.1 sound, 720p, Pal 60, 16:9 ratio - standard suport for all Xenon titles. ALL of them must have this suport. Well the pal stuff is euroland only, but we're smart enoguht to figure that out heh
Why compare the retail price to the wholesale price?sonycowboy said:
The point is that flash memory has super-fast access speeds AND scales down in price much better. Think about how expensive a 64MB card was a few years ago $90-100 at least....and now you can buy cards with 15 to 20 times as much storage for probably half of the cost. Everybody so far has noted that the problem with hard drives is that they do not get much cheaper as time goes on, but flash just gets cheaper and cheaper.
How is flash "less reliable"? HDD is full of moving parts, and will fuck up if the console gets dropped or jumbled around too much in shipping.
This is also an interesting possibility.
sonycowboy
Member
crazy buttocks on a train said:
Not exactly interesting stuff there, as that all seems minimum spec kind of stuff.
sonycowboy
Member
border said:
Well, flash memory has certainly taken off over the past several years giving tremendous performance jumps and price reductions. However, an 8MB card doesn't cost much more than a 1GB card from a manufacturing standpoint. Just like hard drives, the low end price usually hovers the same and the capacity just keeps going up. That does not allow for significant price savings over the long term when you've committed to a certain size.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
720p being standard wouldn't make 1080i undoable.IJoel said:
However, progressive > interlaced so yay.
MightyHedgehog
Member
Well, the better question is, what are you doing with that much space? Night Trap 2?
PanopticBlue
Member
IJoel said:
I agree. They should give the option of 720p or 1080i. I'd prefer 1080i as that looks best on my tv (otherwise it scales 720p up to 1080i). Lots of people have sets that are unable to display 720p at all, so they should definately provide the option.
MightyHedgehog
Member
I'd imagine that something fairly automatic will take care of 1080i output, aside from relying on the display having to upscan the signal.
I just pray to the mighty Gods of gaming than Xenon WON'T be ever the lead SKU for any title. EVER. It would hurt not only PC gaming (like the rumours about Call of Duty 2 being a Xenon first title) but PS3 gaming as well (PS3 storage medium = 25 GB = massive textures and worlds, Xenon's medium = laughable 7 GB, the same as GTA:SA?!?!?!?).
Develop games for PS3/ PC and dumb them down (GFX, SFX, etc.) to Xenon.
PLEASE!
I'm buying PS3 and I don't want to have a f*cking port of a inferior Xenon title for Chrissake.
Develop games for PS3/ PC and dumb them down (GFX, SFX, etc.) to Xenon.
PLEASE!
I'm buying PS3 and I don't want to have a f*cking port of a inferior Xenon title for Chrissake.
MightyHedgehog
Member
Borys said:
LMAO That's some funny shit right there ^^^ Maybe we should wait until the PS3 and Xenon specs are released, not just some thoretical maximum specs for the computational power of the first incarnation of the Cell architecture. After all, there's very much still the all-important issue of the VPU and its integration to the console to consider. Oh yeah, the games are important, too. ;P
Borys said:
Ah... so you must feel extremely disappointed by today's games, considering the PS2 is usually the lead SKU for multiplatform development.
That said, it's doubtful that textures would be affected by the media size (in this case) as the systems themselves won't have more than 1GB (if that) of RAM. Currently all PC graphic intensive games fit comfortably in a DVD with space to spare. Considering we'll be seeing a lot of cinematics done using the graphics engine (and knowing this is one of the things that usually take the most space in discs) I don't foresee media being a problem. This is not even taking in consideration the manufacturing costs of the media itself. Having a double dvd game (14 GB in this supposed Xbox 2 case) might be cheaper than a single BluRay disc.
Crazymoogle
Member
IJoel said:
But very few of them actually can show 1920x1080. The rest are just omitting lines or scaling down the picture (ie: Sony CRT HDTVs are usually around 1440x1080, as I recall, and most plasma/LCD sets can only display just above 720p, regardless of what formats they accept). The problem is so widespread that in some parts of the world, 1080i broadcasts are now done using the stripped down resolution instead of the full one, to save on bandwidth.
It makes far more sense to standardize 720p and provide a scaler.
"--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I just pray to the mighty Gods of gaming than Xenon WON'T be ever the lead SKU for any title. EVER. It would hurt not only PC gaming (like the rumours about Call of Duty 2 being a Xenon first title) but PS3 gaming as well (PS3 storage medium = 25 GB = massive textures and worlds, Xenon's medium = laughable 7 GB, the same as GTA:SA?!?!?!?).
Develop games for PS3/ PC and dumb them down (GFX, SFX, etc.) to Xenon.
PLEASE!
I'm buying PS3 and I don't want to have a f*cking port of a inferior Xenon title for Chrissake."
Dude I don't consider myself an expert but I know the size of textures used is more dependant on the internal ram and bandwidth than the actual medium it's written on. They could easily use multiple DVD's for a game. Just because the PS3 storage medium is 25GB it doesn't mean the system will be able to load all of that in its ram at once. Maybe streaming games will have an advantage but I still don't see any one chapter of a game(a la Resident Evil 4) exceeding 7gb worth of storage and textures. Hence if you wanna use a texture happy game, you can just cut a game on multiple DVD's. So breathe. It's really no big deal.
I just pray to the mighty Gods of gaming than Xenon WON'T be ever the lead SKU for any title. EVER. It would hurt not only PC gaming (like the rumours about Call of Duty 2 being a Xenon first title) but PS3 gaming as well (PS3 storage medium = 25 GB = massive textures and worlds, Xenon's medium = laughable 7 GB, the same as GTA:SA?!?!?!?).
Develop games for PS3/ PC and dumb them down (GFX, SFX, etc.) to Xenon.
PLEASE!
I'm buying PS3 and I don't want to have a f*cking port of a inferior Xenon title for Chrissake."
Dude I don't consider myself an expert but I know the size of textures used is more dependant on the internal ram and bandwidth than the actual medium it's written on. They could easily use multiple DVD's for a game. Just because the PS3 storage medium is 25GB it doesn't mean the system will be able to load all of that in its ram at once. Maybe streaming games will have an advantage but I still don't see any one chapter of a game(a la Resident Evil 4) exceeding 7gb worth of storage and textures. Hence if you wanna use a texture happy game, you can just cut a game on multiple DVD's. So breathe. It's really no big deal.
TAJ
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
>>>>I just pray to the mighty Gods of gaming than Xenon WON'T be ever the lead SKU for any title. EVER. It would hurt not only PC gaming (like the rumours about Call of Duty 2 being a Xenon first title) but PS3 gaming as well (PS3 storage medium = 25 GB = massive textures and worlds, Xenon's medium = laughable 7 GB, the same as GTA:SA?!?!?!?).
Develop games for PS3/ PC and dumb them down (GFX, SFX, etc.) to Xenon.
PLEASE!
I'm buying PS3 and I don't want to have a f*cking port of a inferior Xenon title for Chrissake.<<<<<
Replace Xenon with PS2, replace PS3 with Xbox, and that's EXACTLY what I thought about the current generation.
Also, you're all wrong. DVD-9s hold exactly 7.95 gigabytes.
Develop games for PS3/ PC and dumb them down (GFX, SFX, etc.) to Xenon.
PLEASE!
I'm buying PS3 and I don't want to have a f*cking port of a inferior Xenon title for Chrissake.<<<<<
Replace Xenon with PS2, replace PS3 with Xbox, and that's EXACTLY what I thought about the current generation.
Also, you're all wrong. DVD-9s hold exactly 7.95 gigabytes.
JoshuaJSlone
Member
The analogy would be if GameCube was the lead system, and thus a game like GTA:SA skimped on something since it was designed with a 1.5 GB limit in mind.IJoel said:
JoshuaJSlone said:
Err... he mentions PC game development in there, which is why the assumption was made regarding dumbing down ports to different platforms, as is the case today with many games.
In any case, the notion that graphics quality nowadays (and even in the foreseeable next few years) is hindered by the current storage capacity is flawed, as the limitation lies on the VRAM.
The difference is that PC games are NOT designed to run from a DVD, they get installed to a HDD, and the only priority with disc data layout is to minimize space use. On consoles the disc data layout is normally optimized for speed, and that can actually result in quite large disparities.IJoel said:
On a console, you'll group stuff in the order it gets loaded as much as possible, even if that means that a piece of data (say a texture) will be stored on the disc 50 times for every one of the 50 stages it is used in.
You can say that again - I don't want to feel how Xbox users are often feeling now getting lots of PS2-ports.
Of course there's still hope that Xenon won't be THE underpowered console.
Storage space is one thing (you can't deny that BR-Disc IS larger than DVD9), cpu and gpu another, I know, but all this Xenon rumours are making me worried about next-gen games that's all.
Of course there's still hope that Xenon won't be THE underpowered console.
Storage space is one thing (you can't deny that BR-Disc IS larger than DVD9), cpu and gpu another, I know, but all this Xenon rumours are making me worried about next-gen games that's all.
ManaByte
Gold Member
IJoel said:
Actually DVD is becoming less and less space for PC developers and some are just now starting to realize that people hate installing from 4+ CDs. Almost ALL of EA's new PC games come out with a DVD option (MoH, Sims 2, Battle for Middle Earth all came on DVD and Battlefield 2 is coming on DVD as well). UT2k4 also came out on DVD, and a lot of companies are actually re-releasing older PC games on DVD now like the Neverwinter Nights Platinum release. Another example is EQII. The CD ROM version is TEN discs, while the DVD ROM version is packed on two DVDs.
And as Faf explained, PC games just use the disc as a delivery method. After the game is installed, the disc is just used as a anti-piracy check when booting the game.
Duckhuntdog
Member
Deepthroat said:
Did they mention you have to upgrade to a whole new live with Xenon.
Duckhuntdog
Member
MightyHedgehog said:
Well, some of us game devs do have final Xenon specs.
Except you don't, because Microsoft is still months away from locking them down.Duckhuntdog said:Well, some of us game devs do have final Xenon specs.
These specs sound pretty credible, but they are minimum requirements specs -- a heads up to developers as to what the requirements will be for certification.
Duckhuntdog
Member
Che said:
Going off the papers I saw, backwards comp is somewhat up in the air, but with a strong lean towards no. Specs finalized is a yes, the casing was finalized about a week ago. HD appears to be optional, the money is in the memory cards, kids.
Fafalada said:
Very true, and this is definitely the reasoning for the disparities between PC and their console counterparts (in terms of size.) Even after being installed in a HD, however, most games (don't know one yet) don't exceed a dual layer capacity DVD. Of course, HD transfer rates are much higher than those in DVD drives, so that will probably account for a significant difference.
I just don't foresee a dual layer DVD format being a hindrance to graphics quality. I don't even see BluRay being used for the PS3 as game media soon after its release.
Duckhuntdog
Member
Rhindle said:
Papers I saw were pretty far along and looked to be final, the only issues that had questions surrounding them was total system memory, BC support, hard drive, and CPU speed. They even gave out expected perfomance increase/loss with final hardware.
Yeah they gave out base line certification requirements as well.
I suspect a similar situation might happen as did with PS2, most early games shipped on CD, with a few high end things on DVD. But that ratio didn't last for very long, and probably won't in this case either.IJoel said:
Especially if the drive will have faster transfer rates for reading BRD discs also. 4xBRD would be faster then anything regular DVD based - but it's also entirely possible that DVD mode being secondary would read at lower speeds then competition as well.
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